Connecting a call is well-known and readily appreciated by those of skill in the art. Typically, a caller will call a provider to speak to a representative of the provider. Some providers may, for example, be involved in multiple business areas that may be very different from each other, and the caller may need to speak to a specific representative of one of those business areas. Conventionally, the caller will first be connected to an initial representative who then attempts to determine the proper representative of the provider to whom the caller needs to be transferred. The connecting of the caller from the initial representative to the proper representative raises a number of issues.
Conventionally, the initial representative has access to multiple phone number repositories that house representatives' phone numbers across the different business lines of the provider. These repositories are generally not organized well, and are typically either not updated or are updated very slowly in response to changes in the representatives' numbers. The initial representative typically must choose their ‘best guess’ of a number from one of the repositories that may connect the caller to a representative who might help them. This can result in a high number of misdirected calls, with callers connected to representatives in the wrong business areas. Also, some of these repositories may include only high-level numbers for a given business area, which can result in multiple transfers to connect a caller to the proper representative. Such conventional systems use resources to connect calls while providing a bad caller experience that takes up a significant amount of both the provider's and the caller's time, with little consistency regarding the representatives that two similarly situated callers may be connected to for a similar call.
Accordingly, it is desirable to provide an improved system and method to connect a call.